Mastering Night Photography with High ISO: How AI Enhances Your Shots

So, do you know when you’re out in the night? You’re out taking photographs, no more sunlight, and the light’s so beautiful. The ones coming from the street lamps, the beams coming from the cars, the colorful lights coming from the signs in the stores, and they’re giving everything like a very cool ambience.

Everything looks so powerful, right? And you want to take a photo of that, but you don’t want to eat your fear with the flash, because then you’ll be taking it off. But on the other hand, you could only keep the light if you pull the ISO of your camera high, and then you don’t take the photo because you don’t want to have a noisy photograph, and then you walk away and you forget about it. So, that happened to me before, but not this time.

Exploring Night Photography Techniques

The mission, guys, was to go out into the night, street photography style, take my ISO as high as I could, and then play around with the time value and with the F-stop. These photos are going to be super noisy. Come back, denoise the photos, and see how much we could save on it, and how strange it looked once I denoised with the new tools that we have available in our hands.

I’m Orely, I’m a photographer. I’m excited to be here with all of you and to get a chance to explain my workflow, and hopefully you’re encouraged to go out into the world and explore with the tools that you already have in your camera.

The Exposure Triangle

The basic theory is like, don’t pull your ISO too much. Keep it between the low numbers, 100, 200, 800. Oh my god, if you need to, like, don’t go that far. Basic photography, you have the exposure triangle, and then you have ISO, you have time value, and then you have F-stop. It’s just a very nice relationship of three factors.

ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor, and the other ones that are kind of self-explanatory. You have the F-stop, which is the diaphragm, and then you have the time value, which is the time that takes to open and close. How do you get a very nice exposed photograph? It’s when you get the balance between those three factors. Other things interfere, but that’s the main thing you need to know.

My Night Shoot in Madrid

I’m in Madrid right now. I just went out onto one of the main streets. Picture the scene: very dark at night. It was like 11:00 p.m., and the only lighting was coming from all those screens in the street, plus the street lamps and the beams coming from the cars.

For the settings of the shoot, I was using 12,800 for ISO. That stayed across the whole session. For time value, I switched. I played around with movement, so it was like long exposure and then a quick exposure in a few frames, to 1/350 tops, and then 1/15 of a second. But about the F-stop, that was the main constraint because I was using this lens, which is a Canon 24-105. I like it a lot, but the main concern is that it can only go down to F4, and that gave me less light.

Adjusting White Balance and Focus

For white balance, I chose sunlight. I stayed with that across the whole night. At the beginning, it was a very good choice because that evened out the tone. But when I got to the end of the street, the light from the street lamps was changing, and the bulbs are yellow. It was not the most accurate setting at that time of the night, but at the beginning, it was okay. In any case, we fixed it with editing.

I was shooting in raw, and for the focus, I was on one shot mainly, and also I switched to servo because I was facing a set of street performances.

On the shoot, I took some filters with me. These two are plastic, and they help to add texture to the light around me at night. Sometimes it can be a lifesaver if the action is not as interesting. I also had a cross light filter, which gives sparkle to the light.

Editing with AI Tools

Now, let’s go into the photographs. I took many photos but actually used Imagen calling to help me out, which saved a lot of time. After reviewing everything, I made a selection of 21 photos. I’m going to close Lightroom and create a new project in Imagen. I selected one light AI profile that I created.

Now it’s editing. The main thing I struggled with was to get interesting photos. Once you combine architecture, lighting, contrast, and people, you can get a very nice photograph that tells a story. I walked down Gran Via and arrived at Callao Plaza, where a set of street performers were giving a show. They had a very nice attitude, and people were joining in.

After looking at the photos, I captured random portraits as well. I got very observant of the lighting and how it interacted with the city. There were no harsh reflections, but we got cool photos. The patch is ready, and I’m going to download it.

Results and Reflections

Here are the photos. The first was one of my favorites. On the history panel, you can see how Imagen edited it. I love how it turned out. With one of the filters, you see the blurry edges, and the star filter also added great texture.

Now we get to the street performer. I’m playing with the light. The expression on this one is amazing. The DeNoise did a good job. Let’s take a look at the settings. For example, for this shot, it was 1/250 seconds and ISO 12,800. It was noisy, but now it’s not anymore, which is cool.

I really liked the moment of a couple laughing. I even utilized one of the filters for this photo, and you can see the refracting light from the circle. The noise was very apparent on the skin tones, which is usually the hardest aspect of editing nighttime photos.

These are the final photos. I think we did a pretty good job, guys. The DeNoise feature makes me feel more confident about shooting at a very high ISO, not worrying too much about the results with the tools available. What do you think?

Thank you so much for joining me on this editing video. I hope you get a chance to try it on your own. If you have any settings that work for you in dark environments, please share them with me and our community in the comments below.

Thanks again. I’m Orely and see you next time.